University of Virginia Library

37. CHAPTER XXXVII.

O my God!” cried Harry, who at the
sight of that face grew suddenly weak as
a child; “it's Margaret!” The woman
who knelt before the stove, her face revealed
by the upcast light of the candle,
had seen twenty years of life. Her brown
hair relieved a pale countenance, lighted
by large hazel eyes. There was great
loveliness and much suffering conjoined
in every line of that countenance—deep
suffering, that does not relieve itself in
tears or wild ejaculations, but seats
itself at the heart, and slowly gnaws the
life away.

Poor Margaret! when we saw you
last, you were so blooming on lip and
cheek; there was such joyousness in
your eyes—not a pulse of your young
bosom but swelled with the inspiration
of hope and love—and now, so sorrow-stricken
and heart-broken, with the
fever of an irreparable calamity burning
in your large beautiful eyes! It's a
world of change, Margaret—of sad, terrible
change—of friendships that betray
with a kiss—of loves that are bought and
sold, like merchandize in the marketplace—of
hopes that are nourished
through long years, and that ripen to
fulfilment only to be gathered by the
hand of death—physical death, killing
the body, or that unutterable moral
death which ossifies the soul; a world,
Margaret, which no one in the dawn of
manhood or womanhood, seeing, as with
prophetic sight, all the way of the future,
plain as day, would have the courage to
live in for a single hour.

And if, since last we saw you, Margaret,
you have sinned; if the pure blossom of
your virgin soul has been trampled into
the mire of temptation and crime, why,
God be merciful to you, and may you
rather be dealt with by His justice than
by the tenderest mercy of man!

On the window-sill Harry leaned,
stricken into child-like weakness by
that sight.

“And so Burke lied to me,” he muttered.
“But he spoke so smooth and
fair, I could'nt help believe him! This
is livin' on your means, is it? A
half a dollar, a pound o' sugar and coffee,
an' a home like this! Such means and
such livin'!”

Again Harry laid his face against the
window-pane, with a faint hope that it
might not be his Margaret whom he
saw thus reduced to the lowest stage of
destitution—but no! His eyes did not
deceive him. That pale woman, kneeling
on the naked floor, was his Margaret—
his wife!

“But I'll make it all right yet; for
every day of want that you have suffered,
you shall have a thousand of peace and
comfort, and—”

Harry went from the window, put his
hand upon the door, and entered the
miserable room, pausing a short space
from the threshold, so that the candlelight
lit up his sunburnt face.

Margaret raised her eyes with a nervous
movement of surprise, and then her
eyes expanded, her face grew paler, and
with a wild scream she stretched forth
her arms. God help me! It is his
ghost!” And fell forward upon her face
like a dead woman.

Henry knelt on the floor beside her,
and took her to his bosom tenderly with
his toil-hardened hands, pushing her unloosened
hair aside from her face, and
more than once pressing his lips to her
cold forehead and colder lips. All the
while the light which shone upward upon
his face showed every feature working,
spasm-like, as though the man could not
speak, to tell in words the emotions
which swelled his chest.

“I am back again, and rich—rich do
you hear me, Margaret?” he said, again
and again, holding her in his arms, and
gazing upon her face with all the tenderness
of a rude-looking but kind-hearted
nurse soothing a sick child.

“Rich! rich! Not so rich as Astor,
but rich enough for both of us!”

Alas! brave Harry! there are some
evils which gold, holy and beautiful as
it is—gold, so devoutly worshipped every
where, cannot cure!

It was a long time before her cheek
glowed with the color of life again; and
a long time even after she unclosed her
eyes, and saw his face and heard his
voice, that she could realize that it was
her husband who held her in his arms.

“God help me! Harry, it is you, indeed!”
was her first exclamation, as she
surveyed that honest face, which was
changed, in some respect, but still glowed
with old love for her. “I've thought
you as dead so long—seen you dead
awake and in my dreams so long, that—”
tears came to her relief and she bent her
head and wept upon his breast; wept, as
though every fibre of her heart was
breaking, and put her arms couvulsively
about his neck, as if she were drowning
in some dark river, and in his arms was
her only hope of life.

At length she rose, and glancing rapidly
(with a singular look, which did not
escape Harry,) first at the door which
led out in the dark night, and then at
the door, which opened into the second
room, she sat down and motioned Harry
to take a seat beside her. Her eyes
were downcast, and she picked at the
ends of her shawl in an absent way.

“Why do I find you here, Margaret,”
said Harry, “in such poverty?—” The
name of Stanley Burke, and the story
which Stanley had told him, rose to his
lips; but he thought he would not mention
either, until Margaret spoke of her
cousin. “And mother, how is she?”

“Hush! She is very sick there,” and
Margaret pointed nervously to the door
of the next room. “She is sleeping for
the first time in a long while. Do not
speak loud, Harry,”—how odd the old
name sounded from her lips!—“do not
speak loud!” And a shudder like an
ague-chill pervaded her frame.

“But why, Margaret, darling? Oh!
how often I've thought of you in the rain
and heat and cold, in the mines and on
the sea, and when they left me, as they
thought, dyin' at the foot of the tree, I
saw your face and heard your voice, even
in my fever. Oh! Margaret! you can
never know how dear to me you've been!

Why do I find you and mother in such a
miserable place as this?”

She looked up into his face, long and
eagerly, as though the sight of it was life
to her. “It is a long story, Harry, and
to-night is not the time to tell it; and
to-morrow I will tell you all!”

“But you must leave this place to-night;
you shall not sleep another night
under such a miserable roof.”

“You forget that mother is very sick,
and cannot be moved; to-morrow, Harry,
will be time enough.”

And they talked together of the past
and future, Harry gazing earnestly upon
his wife, and she now looking up in his
face, and now casting that nervous glance
from one door to the other.

How his heart rolled forth in his pictures
of the future! And how often,
after a yearning gaze in his face, she
would turn her face away from the light,
as if to hide its sudden pallor, and the
quick, involuntary quivering of the lips.

“Leave me, Harry, to-night;” she said
at last, “mother is very ill, and I am
worn with work and watching. To-morrow
I will tell you how we came to
live in this miserable place. Yes,” she
said with a singular brightening of her
gaze—“to-morrow we will talk of our
future life!”

And she rose from her chair, and Harry
rose, but it was not until he had taken
her once more to his bosom, pillowed
her head upon his shoulder, and pressed
upon her lips a kiss—we will not assert
decisively that there was only one kiss
—which seemed to bear with it a whole
lifetime of hope and love, condensed into
a single moment, that Harry could be
induced to think of leaving her.

At last he stood ready to depart. “To-morrow!
early to-morrow!” he said.
“To-morrow!” echoed Margaret; and,
after another kiss, she watched the form
of Harry as he moved to the door—oh!
the strange, mad intensity of her gaze!
At the door, Harry paused and looked
back. Margaret stood like a statue in
the centre of the room, and while her
face had grown paler, her eyes were all
the brighter.

“Harry!” the name came from her
lips in a thick and broken voice, and she
bounded to his arms and hung there,
sobbing and trembling on his breast.
“Go, now,” she said, “and to-morrow—
to-morrow!” The words died on her
lips, and she wrung Harry's hands within
her own as she followed him over the
threshold.

“Good-night! to-morrow, darling!”
She heard his voice, even after the shadows
of the night had taken his form from
her sight. And she stood in the doorway
a long time, looking after him, as
though her gaze could pierce the darkness
round her.

As for Harry, he went on his way,
muttering, “And now, Mr. Stanley
Burke, I guess you and I will have a talk
together. These trunks aint safe in your
clutches. By Jove! why did not I think
of mentionin' the matter to Margaret?”
And with the thought of Stanley Burke's
falsehood, and the consciousness that
Margaret was still the Margaret of other
days, occupying his mind by turns, he
went on his way. But the words which
he uttered, as he thought, to the air
alone, were overheard by a listener whose
form was hid by the shadows around the
path.

Turning from the door, Margaret
closed it, and approached the light. A
sudden change had come over her. Her
face, pale enough before, was now livid
and ashy. She trembled in every limb.
As she took up the candle and went to-wards
the next room, you could see the
light shake and quiver, as if in sympathy
with the terror which pervaded her
frame. She entered that room, and
gazed around it with a look that was
nervous, wild, almost mad—a small
chamber, miserably furnished, with a bed
in one corner. There was no one there;
the face of the mother did not meet the
rays of the candle. No mother there
for, alas! the mother of Margaret had
been in her grave two years.

Margaret advanced to the bed, and
held the light over the patched coverlet,
and drew that coverlet gently from the
pillow. Upon that pillow rested a babe,
who, perchance, had seen three months
of life; and its rosy face was touched by
a smile as it slept all calmly and gently
there.

“O my God!” burst from the heart
of Margaret, as she fell weeping on the
pillow beside the child—her child! “O
my God! why did I not tell him all?”